TIMES ONLINE– SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL – UK EYES ONLY

DAVID MANNING
From: Matthew Rycroft
Date: 23 July 2002
S 195 02

cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell

IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER’S MEETING, 23 JULY

Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.

This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.

John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam’s regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August.

The two broad US options were:

(a) Generated Start. A slow build-up of 250,000 US troops, a short (72 hour) air campaign, then a move up to Baghdad from the south. Lead time of 90 days (30 days preparation plus 60 days deployment to Kuwait).

(b) Running Start. Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option.

The US saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either option. Turkey and other Gulf states were also important, but less vital. The three main options for UK involvement were:

(i) Basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus, plus three SF squadrons.

(ii) As above, with maritime and air assets in addition.

(iii) As above, plus a land contribution of up to 40,000, perhaps with a discrete role in Northern Iraq entering from Turkey, tying down two Iraqi divisions.

The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun “spikes of activity” to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.

The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.

On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions.

For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.

The Foreign Secretary thought the US would not go ahead with a military plan unless convinced that it was a winning strategy. On this, US and UK interests converged. But on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences. Despite US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum. Saddam would continue to play hard-ball with the UN.

John Scarlett assessed that Saddam would allow the inspectors back in only when he thought the threat of military action was real.

The Defence Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the US did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush.

Conclusions:

(a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action. But we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any firm decisions. CDS should tell the US military that we were considering a range of options.

(b) The Prime Minister would revert on the question of whether funds could be spent in preparation for this operation.

(c) CDS would send the Prime Minister full details of the proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week.

(d) The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the background on the UN inspectors, and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam.

He would also send the Prime Minister advice on the positions of countries in the region especially Turkey, and of the key EU member states.

(e) John Scarlett would send the Prime Minister a full intelligence update.

(f) We must not ignore the legal issues: the Attorney-General would consider legal advice with FCO/MOD legal advisers.

(I have written separately to commission this follow-up work.)

MATTHEW RYCROFT

(Rycroft was a Downing Street foreign policy aide)

DEMOCRACY NOW– Writing in The Nation magazine, Democracy Now! correspondent Jeremy Scahill reports on Washington’s undeclared air war against Iraq in 2002:

“It was a huge air assault: Approximately 100 US and British planes flew from Kuwait into Iraqi airspace. At least seven types of aircraft were part of this massive operation, including US F-15 Strike Eagles and Royal Air Force Tornado ground-attack planes. They dropped precision-guided munitions on Saddam Hussein’s major western air-defense facility, clearing the path for Special Forces helicopters that lay in wait in Jordan. Earlier attacks had been carried out against Iraqi command and control centers, radar detection systems, Revolutionary Guard units, communication centers and mobile air-defense systems. The Pentagon’s goal was clear: Destroy Iraq’s ability to resist. This was war.

“But there was a catch: The war hadn’t started yet, at least not officially. This was September 2002–a month before Congress had voted to give President Bush the authority he used to invade Iraq, two months before the United Nations brought the matter to a vote and more than six months before “shock and awe” officially began.”

AMY GOODMAN: Here to talk about this all with us is Jeremy Scahill, producer and correspondent for Democracy Now!, has an article at The Nation magazine’s website, called “The Other Bomb Drops: How Bush Began the Iraq Invasion Before He Went to Congress or the U.N.” We are also joined on the telephone by Hans Von Sponeck, former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations. And we are joined by John Bonifaz, who has just begun a website that deals with this issue. He is author of Warrior King: The Case for Impeaching George W. Bush. The website is called, AfterDowningStreet.org, a coalition of various groups urging Congress to begin a formal investigation to whether Bush has committed impeachable offenses in connection with the invasion of Iraq. Let’s begin, Jeremy, with you. Welcome to Democracy Now!, on this side of the mic.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Thank you, Amy. It’s good to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what you found.

JEREMY SCAHILL: I think for many people who have been following the politics of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it comes as no surprise to learn that the Bush administration intentionally misled the U.S. public and the world and operated with tremendous bad faith when it said it was trying to do everything it could to avoid war. And what we have here is really solid documentation that backs that up. What the British Times of London published last weekend was statistics from the British defense ministry that showed that in the second half of 2002—let’s remember that the invasion of Iraq officially began in March of 2003—that from May 2002 until the end of 2002, that the United States and Britain doubled the amount of attacks that—the number of attacks that they were carrying out against Iraq, from the whole of 2001. So, what you saw was the Bush administration ordering attacks, offensive attacks on Iraq, that were intended to take out communications infrastructure in the country, the ability of commanders in the Iraqi military to communicate with one another, pretty much defensive mechanics for the country, and these attacks were happening with the justification that they were protecting the so-called no-fly zones in Iraq.

The real scandal here is that the Bush administration, like the Clinton administration before it, oversaw the longest sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam. We reported on this show for years consistently that the United States was bombing Iraq once every three days. This bombing began—you could say that the preparations for this invasion began the moment that the so-called Gulf War ended and that Clinton laid the groundwork for this in his regular bombings of Iraq. We saw a spike in activity in these so-called no-fly zone attacks which had no U.N. mandate whatsoever, which were not approved by the international community.

AMY GOODMAN: Which are often mistakenly called the U.N. no-fly zones.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. And it was only the United States and Britain. France pulled out almost immediately after the United States began this program. So you had the United States and Britain, and then with the approval and support of some of the puppet regimes in the region that were for whatever reason in bed with the United States. After the passage of the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, you saw an escalation in the so-called no-fly zones. The Clinton administration was using them to try to provoke Saddam Hussein’s regime into attacking the United States to justify further attacks. And you remember there was the heavy bombing known as “Operation Desert Fox” in December of 1998. So the Clinton administration is not innocent here. It carried out illegal bombings against Iraq consistently throughout the presidency of Clinton.

What we saw that sort of changed here under Bush is that the Bush administration dropped all of the rhetoric about the no-fly zones having something to do with defending Shiites or Kurds and actually were quite public about what they were using these no-fly zones for. They were using them to systematically and preemptively degrade Iraq’s ability to defend itself, not from an uprising of Shiites or Kurds, but from the invasion of a foreign army.

AMY GOODMAN: And then, can you locate the Downing Street memo, talk about its significance, and what happened with the bombing then? This Downing Street memo, what, July 23rd, 2002.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yes. It reports on a meeting that senior British officials had had with members of the Bush administration, and what it is is a reflection of what the British understood to be the United States’ policy at the moment. And what’s clear from reading this—it’s actually not a memo, it’s minutes, but it’s called the Downing Street memo. It’s minutes of this meeting with Tony Blair and some of his most senior defense advisers. And the picture that is painted from this memo is that the United States already was not just planning and preparing for war, but was actively carrying out air strikes in support of this war. The invasion had begun already when the British had this meeting. And we find that in the form of remarks attributed to Geoff Hoon within these minutes, where he is talking about the Americans already spiking up activity against Saddam Hussein, and what he’s referring to is the increasing use of these so-called no-fly zones to degrade Iraq’s ability to defend against a U.S. invasion and to prepare the route for U.S. Special Forces to enter into the country. In September of 2002—now this is months before the actual invasion officially began, and a few months before Bush went to the Congress or the United Nations—100 aircraft violate Iraqi airspace, British and American aircraft. They go in and they carry out a systematic campaign of air strikes in the west of Iraq and basically destroy the west of Iraq’s ability to defend against an invasion. And that was one of the main places where U.S. Special Forces troops came in from Jordan into the west of Iraq. That happened in September of 2002. We’re talking about months before the actual invasion began.

AMY GOODMAN: We are talking to Democracy Now! correspondent, Jeremy Scahill, has a piece in The Nation online called “The Other Bomb Drops.” When we come back, we’ll also be joined by attorney John Bonifaz and the former U.N. Assistant Secretary General, Hans Von Sponeck..

NEW YORK TIMES– To paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions.

That’s why the president’s flip-flop on the release of detainee abuse photos — whatever his motivation — is a fool’s errand. The pictures will eventually emerge anyway, either because of leaks (if they haven’t started already) or because the federal appeals court decision upholding their release remains in force. And here’s a bet: These images will not prove the most shocking evidence of Bush administration sins still to come.

There are many dots yet to be connected, and not just on torture. This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld’s corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of “Dead Certain,” the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists.

Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)

Read more at NEW YORK TIMES.

© NY TIMES 2009